oh man…
the situation in iraq just got 100 times worse.
the golden mosque in samarra is one of the shi’ites most sacred places.
and today it was destroyed in a terrorist explosion.
the tension between sunni’s and shi’ites in iraq was already intense, and now it’s just gone past the boiling point.
i hope that i’m wrong, but my belief is that today will be the day that historians look back at and say ‘on february 22nd, 2006 the iraqi civil war began’.
i feel terribly for the men and women in our military who now have to try to prevent or quell a civil war in iraq.
to put it in perspective, imagine if an irish protestant blew up st peters in the vatican.
what would that do to protestant-catholic relations in northern ireland?
that’s basically the equivalent of what happened today in iraq.
the big question will be, ‘how far reaching will the ramifications be? will it involve other islamic countries?’
-moby

i hope that i’m wrong, but i think that the situation in iraq is about to get a lot worse.
the sunni’s in iraq put forth a complaint that the elections were rigged, and the u.n has now said that the elections were fair and that the results are going to stand as they are.
i can’t claim to know the mind of the sunni’s in iraq, but i have a feeling that they’re going to respond with even more violence.
sunni’s in iraq represent around 40% of the population, and they were the dominant social class under saddam hussein.
now they are being, to an extent, marginalized under what is becoming shi’ia rule. and they’re not very happy about this.
i wish that someone in the media would speak up and discuss the ramifications of colonialism in these post-colonial times.
see, borders were drawn almost arbitrarily for hundreds of years, making countries out of completely disparate demographic groups.
thus: yugoslavia, iraq, chechnya, almost all of sub-saharan africa, and so on.
most of the international geo-political problems that we face today are the result of colonialism and arbitrarily drawn borders.
most of the ‘countries’ that are problem spots were never countries in a sense that we in the west understand. france is a country, and has been for centuries. iraq and yugoslavia are new countries, for example, born of colonial and post-colonial border creation. so now we have situations wherein people who historically hated each other are forced to co-habitate and share power.
and it’s, as we can see every time we read the news, a disaster.
and now i have the feeling that the situation in iraq is going to get much worse, due to the sunni’s feeling even more marginalized and disenfranchised.
i hope i’m wrong.
moby